The temperatures have dropped and the landscape has changed, a season many dread is upon us and I can credit ice fishing for me not being one of those people.
The crisp layer on top of the snow pack crunching beneath your feet, each breath exhaled clearly visible as you near your intended spot on the ice. The rare chance of a sun dog on those almost too cold to be outside kind of days. These are just a few of the things I like about ice fishing. With so many species to target and many more bodies of water to fish, some years it feels like there just isn’t enough time, others it feels like winter might never end.
The yellow perch is a common target for many different kinds of ice anglers in pursuit of food, fun and trophy. It is also a main prey of walleye, northern pike and lake trout. In some bodies of water they get stunted, never growing more than 6 to 9 inches, in others they can top out around 16. Either way, they are a reasonably easy species to target with a variety of tactics. I have spent more than a few days on the ice specifically targeting jumbo perch, not necessarily for food more so the trophy aspect. I won’t shy from the occasional meals worth of nine to twelve inchers however, as they make for some tasty fried morsels.
A Few Tackle Options
The options for lures and baits with perch are endless. Silver, perch and firetiger are my go-to colours, but I won’t hesitate to try others. My three favourite lures for Jumbos would have to be a PK spoon, Lindy Darter and a Lindy Rattlin Flyer. You tend to weed out the smaller perch using these lures in my experiences. I like to go big or go home, and when a larger presentation isn’t cutting it I will downsize to small plastics trying to match the hatch, or add a dropper chain to the lure I am using. A minnow frozen or alive on a deadstick will often get hammered if what I am jigging doesn’t cut it, however sometimes the action is so hot a second line becomes detrimental. A light action rod with 2-4 lb line for jigging and small spoons and a medium light for the small cranks have done me well.
One of the latest trophy perch factories to show up on the radar has been the East and West Shoal lakes in Manitoba’s Interlake region. Every trip we make out that way at least one person in our group gets a true football of a perch. The thing that made this lake rare is that the perch had a long time to develop before they were noticed—including by Fisheries Branch. Given the abundant food source and large predators, some individuals in this population are larger than what is achieved in most lakes. The word got out a few years back on the good numbers and huge sizes and it’s been getting hit fairly hard.
When weather allows for fishing outside of a shelter, we usually like to drill a grid pattern of holes 10 to 20 feet apart. This makes staying on the school possible as well as pinpointing the direction they are travelling. This also helps to locate depth contours and possible structure as well as carefully staking your claim. I will go from hole to hole with a flasher and a few different rods and lures never spending more than five minutes trying different lures in hopes of finding a hungry school. If a good bite is found, I will keep fishing that hole until the action dies off. Only then moving on to the other nearby holes, in hopes of staying on the bite.
More often than not, especially over the last two ice seasons, Mother Nature hasn’t been to kind with the nicer days to fish. It’s these days where the above strategy makes sense for finding a good place to set up shelter and hunker down. Remember that moving once or twice to possible greener pastures could make for better fishing, or be a waste of calories and time. We usually do this by having one or two stay at the shelter and fish and another pair head off and try different areas.
That brings me to a cold blustery day in the middle of winter, we drilled a grid pattern and got to fishing. We ended up being on the fish almost right away and decided to set up our shelter for a home base as the wind started to pick up. Before we knew it, the wind was gusting 30 to 50 kilometres per hour and we had no choice but to fish inside the shelter. Schools would come and go with a few beauty perch over 13 inches caught and released, but eventually the flurry of perch action seemed a distant memory. It was then we had to start trying different lures and find out what could trigger the bite, or call the fish in.
Changing up presentations and techniques we were able to get some wary perch to continue to bite. I went from a PK Spoon to a Lindy Darter and began lightly pounding it on the bottom and raising it a few inches, stirring up sediment could sometimes help trigger a feeding frenzy. When the bite would slow, I would raise my lure higher in the water column and give it a few rips and let it fall to the bottom repeating the disturbance. Having a lure higher in the water column can more often than not get the attention of a fish further away and they should move in to investigate. This has worked with a variety of different jigging spoons and lipless cranks. Remember to try and have a throwback rod rigged with something smaller like a 1/16 jig with a Northlands Bloodworm or a Scud Bug if the spoon or crank can’t entice a bite.
If you are lucky enough to hook into a true jumbo perch, you may find the fight to be a little more exciting than your average set the hook and up the ice hole routine that perch fishing can be. Often they go on multiple short runs and violently shake their head near the ice like a walleye or pike. When the bite is on it can be pure excitement in the shack with multiple double and triple headers and the occasional toothy pike in the mix. Young or old, there is something to be said about a day on the ice targeting perch, especially waters where there is a chance at a big one. It’s time to load up the gear and head to where the jumbos grow.